This Facebook scam cost one man $50,000

When you hear the stories of people who've been conned, it's often easy to pass judgment. But, keep in mind, scammers work to perfect their craft, just like the rest of us. In many cases, there may be something that seems slightly off, but there are also logical reasons to justify it. This makes picking out a scam more difficult.

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This Facebook scam cost one man $50,000

The original Facebook homepage from 2004 with a small picture of Al Pacino in the top left corner.

At the same time, Facebook introduced the Mini-Feed. But the entire concept of a News Feed resulted in some very public outrage. Some users even went so far to call one of Facebook's product managers the devil.

Facebook also owns a bunch of other popular apps, most notably Instagram, which the company bought for $1 billion in 2012. With more than 400 million monthly users, that seems like a steal nowadays.

Photo courtesy: Business Insider

2015 was a big year for Facebook that saw its first ever day with one billion users online simultaneously. The company had figured out how to make money from mobile too, turning it into a $300 billion business.

Today, more than 1.5 billion people use the social network every single month.

Photo courtesy: Facebook

And more than 1.4 billion people use it on their mobile phones every month. Not bad, considering 12 years ago smartphones didn't even exist.

Photo courtesy: Facebook

Here's the Facebook homepage today, on its 12th birthday.

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When you hear the stories of people who've been conned, it's often easy to pass judgment. But, keep in mind, scammers work to perfect their craft, just like the rest of us. In many cases, there may be something that seems slightly off, but there are also logical reasons to justify it. This makes picking out a scam more difficult.

That was the case for a man named Frank, who lost $50,000 through an elaborate Facebook scam.

It started when he received a Facebook Friend Request from a woman named Kim. He'd never met Kim before, but she claimed to be a drill sergeant in the U.S. Army, who was stationed in Afghanistan. Their conversations seemed completely normal at first, but eventually led into more.

Kim and Frank's relationship wasn't anything romantic. Instead, the two became friends, and Kim eventually asked Frank for a favor.

"As we were talking on Facebook, she asked me to help her get a couple of consignment packages out of Ghana and into the States," Frank explained. "[She said they'd] be delivered to me."

He agreed to help her, and Kim provided him with instructions. She put him in contact with a company called Say Cargo Express Inc., and various legal and shipping personnel.

"The packages contained, according to Kim, $10.5 million in cash and $70,000 in gold bars," Frank said. And he was promised that once the package arrived, he'd receive a commission.

Other parties from the shipping company soon began corresponding with Frank regarding the cargo. There was even a man named Tony Lithur who claimed to be a lawyer, hired to ensure that everything was done legally.

Frank began losing money in small increments at a time. First, he was asked to send $3,000 to cover Lithur's legal fees. Next, he was asked to send $9,000 to cover the storage fee for customs. The big scams came when he was asked to pay two different $17,000 installments to cover the gold fee from the Ghana government, and fee for the IRS.

The parties involved communicated with Frank for around four months, dragging out the process with "hiccup" after "hiccup," and requesting fee after fee. Eventually, Frank began to suspect that he was being scammed.

"To be honest, when she brought the proposal about the consignment I was skeptical," Frank said. "But in the back of my mind I thought, 'Why would someone from the U.S. Army want to scam me?"

That's just the thing, isn't it? Some of these scams really do sound legitimate. And, unfortunately, most people don't discover that they've been scammed until it's too late.

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